Purity Culture and the Duggar Family

Have you noticed or read about the Duggar family?

TW: everything related s3xu@l abuse

For a little info…

They were the stars of TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting. Josh Duggar was the eldest son on 19 Kids and Counting, and was revealed to have sexually abused his younger sisters, a minimum of 5 girls, as a teenager. He was "disciplined at home” for his actions. His punishment included doing physical labor and construction, the bare minimum counseling that he was given was Christian counseling, rooted in purity culture. Years later, in 2021, he was arrested on child pornography charges for minors under the age of 12. At this time, he was a father of 7 children. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison, 20 years of supervision after prison, and can have no unsupervised contact with minors ever again, including his own children. His wife is still married to him. 

Joseph Duggar, the 7th child in the 19 kids family, was recently arrested on charges related to the molestation of a 9 year old girl. He and his wife are also being tried in a completely separate case for child endangerment of their own children.

My writing in this piece comes from the lens of someone who is trained in the field of Sacred Sexuality, somatic sex education, as someone raised in a religion of conservative, Evangelical Christianity, and as someone who experienced non-consensual sexual experiences in the same faith as a very young girl. It is from my lens, spiritually, professionally, and personally that I bring you this.

How I speak of the Duggar family in this article is not meant to cast shame, blame, or judgement on any individual in their family. I have thought of how to speak on this cultural expression for a VERY long time. 

This writing is intended to view their family as simply a reflection, one of a million other evangelical families whose core beliefs of multiple generations lead to “evil’. 

This type of evil—what some might call dark magic—lives in the very soil of these communities.

It’s a pattern embedded in culture.

‘Evil’ is ‘live’ backwards: life-taking, energy-draining, a theft of the body’s aliveness. 

It is the opposite of Eros, our sacred aliveness, which connects us to the true Divinity.

Purity culture distorts this aliveness, teaching that desire is sin, that natural erotic energy is dangerous, and in doing so, it disempowers entire generations. 

It disconnects all people under its influence from embodied consent. 

The result is not simply sexual repression, but disconnection from bodily autonomy.

Joseph and Josh Duggar aren’t anomalies. They were groomed to be predators just as the girls were groomed to be victims.They’re the predictable growth result of a foundation built on sexual shame, circumcision which I view as traumatic, female submission, child obedience, authoritarianism and community protection.

This is what the system creates. 

It’s not the fault of a single person. It's a pervasive result of MANY individuals over multiple generations.  

It’s the power of toxic beliefs rooted in thousands of years of justification.

The issue with pervasiveness is that it’s normalized.

It’s not a dramatic child trafficking scene.

It’s not a ritual on Epstein’s island.

Which are happening, which are dark magic, and the effects of which hold greater magnetism due to the intention cast within it. 

This type of evil, of dark magic so to speak, lives in the very soil in which the children of these communities are raised.

Very similar to how I was raised.

It’s in the small moments.

When we force kids to give hugs and kisses they don’t want so as not to offend elders.

When we teach children to never question authority. 

So, abuse happens due to lack of consent.

The young boys were raised without consent.

The young girls were raised without consent.

NO ONE was raised understanding consent of THEIR OWN BODY. 

Children taught that adults are the ultimate authority, never to question them.

Women and girls taught that men are the authority, never to question them. 

This is how wounds are not just personal…they are inherited, conditioned, and reinforced. The mother wound, the father wound, the brother wound, the sister wound, the witch wound—these are not isolated experiences. They are patterns that create the subconscious reality that we view our life from. 

When girls are raised to believe that the boys are their superiors from birth, are more important, and will be their leaders one day…the brother wound is created.

So, every single person is operating under a worldview that says…

The boy's bodies belong to (the false) “God”, to the church. 

The girls' bodies belong to the men. 

From birth, their boys' genitals are mutilated in male circumcision. In no other context could a person be held down, their genitals sliced, permanently atlered and it not be considered rape and torture.

For a long time, boys were not given pain medication during this.

Brain scans show permanent modifications to the infant's baseline brain configuration, particularly in the amygdala, as well as the frontal and temporal lobes due to circumcision. 

Their first imprint in the world is to not trust the feminine.

They’re taken from their mother, their genitals are mutilated. 

The subconscious imprint? The feminine has failed me and my body isn’t mine. The mother wound sinks deep.

Abuse happens to boys from men—whether physical, sexual, mental, or emotional—while simultaneously being taught they are superior to girls. This creates a profound father wound: a split between power and pain, dominance and devastation.

In the case of Josh Duggar, the eldest of 19 children, there was likely an early burden of perfection and responsibility. Positioned as a model child and enforcer of order, he carried the weight of discipline within the family while also receiving its harshest pressure. 

From birth, he was assigned the role of “man,” “leader,” and future authority within the church—an identity built before he had the capacity to become it.

In that faith, anytime he would have engaged in experimenting with his sexuality, through masturbation, self touch…it was wrong. Bad. Shameful. A Sin.

He was told he was sinning. 

The problem with the concept of sin is that it can be forgiven so easily. And they’re all equal. And everyone is born bad and sinful. The core belief is that all of us are born with “original sin”, the idea that each person is born a sinner.

This creates an environment where the person “committing sin” has no concept of the psychological harm, consequences, and deeper impact of their actions. 

While I don't believe in sin, we can all agree that the impact of lying to a boss that a person is sick and calling off ​​—and sexually abusing another person —have much different impacts.

One might make your boss not trust you at the worst. 

The other permanently changes another person's brain chemistry, sense of safety, understanding of trust in the world, and capacity to have healthy relationships for the rest of their life. 

The catch 22 here is that the person who committed the violation traumatizes themselves in the process.

The concept of “all sin is equal” creates an environment where responsibility, transformation, and true growth cannot happen. 

This stifling environment of lack of responsibility, accountability, and true transformation is upheld by those in the church.

Sin can be forgiven. The secular world’s ideas around sex and sexuality are dangerous. Only purity is allowed.

So the boys who feel powerless, defeated, abused in their one way…grow into men who seek to find the power that was taken from them. 

So they fall into the illusion of feeling power is to do harm to the girls, out of uncontrolled desire. 

For all desire has been shame, cast into shadow from birth. 

When desire is shamed, it does not disappear—it becomes unconscious.

Without education, consent frameworks, or emotional integration, power can emerge through control, secrecy, or harm rather than connection or awareness.

This is not inherent—it is conditioned.

When something our bodies are BIOLOGICALLY dependent on—the pure essence of every single person’s existence—is condemned at a cultural level, it creates distortions in the field. 

The witch wound keeps everyone silent. If they speak up, they may be cast out. Shunned. Their DNA says they’ll die if they speak out. They cannot gain power through their voice, so they stay silent. They stay small. And they allow abuse to thrive. 

I know of two little girls close in my upbringing who were sexually abused by their older brother. 

When it was discovered, the grandmother asked the older little girl “why did you let him do that to you?” 

The mother wound cuts deep when a girl has lost the approval, the love, of the matriarch over something that wasn’t hers to hold.

The brother wound cuts deep when a girl is blamed for the actions of an out of control older boy, or worse, a man.

The witch wound imprints further in the girl…if i tell anyone, no one will love me. For love is already being withheld by being blamed.

The father wound imprints as the girl wasn’t protected by the father, by the masculine, or by the church. This further anchors when the father protects the reputation of the brother, the image of the family, over the safety of the child.

She swallows her rage. Her body stays frozen in time. She disassociates from the body entirely.

So for the little to gain love, she defends the brother. Or minimizes his impact as some of the Duggar sisters did. She continues to try to be a good girl for her family. 

Perhaps, like Josh Duggar’s wife, she stays with a man based on a combination of these wounds even when she knows he is in the wrong. The conditioning is too strong to shake. 

The saddest part of the impact on little girls goes beyond the trauma in childhood.

It’s seeing how brainwashed they still are as adults. It’s witnessing them defend the men who caused them harm, seek love from those who harmed them, and continue the same process with their children. 

Witnessing them conform to the same beliefs that caused their harm and passing it down their lineage.

A culture rooted in purity ideology does not create pathways for deep sexual accountability or healing. It prioritizes forgiveness over transformation, and obedience over integration. In that structure, why do the deeper work—if everything can be absolved without change?

Josh Duggar was discovered abusing his younger sisters as a teenager. The response was containment, not confrontation. The parents covered it up. The church framed it through forgiveness. The girls were expected to forgive and move forward.

What is lost in that process is not just accountability—but the possibility of true repair, for everyone involved.

It was a massive disservice to the girls, yes, who will forever be impacted by that. It was a massive disservice to all of the girls in the evangelical faiths who watched the controversy happen and no action taken. It further reinforced the narrative—forgive the man who harms you, forget it, and move on. 

It was a massive disservice to Josh Duggar, who possibly could have received deep healing wouldn’t be sitting in a jail cell. 

Many more girls would have been protected…and Joseph Duggar? Likely wouldn’t have been resigned to the same fate.

A system designed to support male hierarchy has even failed the MEN it was “supposedly” designed for.

Until we liberate ourselves from purity culture..

TRULY break free of it…this will continue to happen. 

The reality is that the Duggar family is the most extreme example of the cultural soil everyone in this country has existed under. 

They’re a mirror being held up to reveal the shadows of purity culture, which this country was founded on.

We were a country colonized by Puritans, the most extreme of the already puritanical branch of Christianity and yet this isn’t exclusive to Christianity. The toxic effects of purity culture exist under all Abrahamic religions, which operate the masses globally.

The “secular” world never unrooted the effects and subconscious beliefs, so while it appears to be “liberated”, I’ve witnessed purity culture in the secular world.

When someone isn’t “woke” enough, or “left” enough. Perhaps they have a belief that doesn’t fit the current community they are in. So they are ostracized for it. 

It’s a rebranding of purity culture and the witch wound…dressed up in identity politics.

Until we do the work within, the external reality will reflect the internal patterning. 

Learning consent with our own bodies is the first step.

Seeing the wounds is the second step—recognizing what has been carried, and how it travels across generations.

If we don’t understand consent with our own body, we cannot give consent to another person.

If we don’t see how this cycle is living within the core wounds of our experience as the feminine, we will repeat it. 

Once we understand this, we embody it in every aspect of life.

Through this, we slowly become the change we wish to see in the world.